trying hard to work on so many things right now. and working mostly, but finding it so hard to focus sometimes, just flitting from thing to thing, finding myself in that terrible trap of scrolling scrolling scrolling
but stay stay with it follow the thought through
i am going back and working on the poetry, trying to shine its edges, empty its extra corners, arrange it well for a guest in the house, for all the new guests in the wordhouse of my poetry that i am hoping for. but it is hard, and sometimes i go back and worry that i am emptying the rooms of character, that i have polished too much and i do not feel a fire in the walls anymore. i am worrying the words coming out of my mouth these days are bare and suave but have no flame, no passion in the belly. i do not want to arrange words for the sake of it, for a music that does not char my ears, does not worry me hard and make me shiver in the nape of the neck.
i feel that poetry lives on the edge of experience; that you find it if you inhabit the margins of the moment. as if you are there and not there, very hard. either living right in the heart of what is happening to you/what you are doing/what exists, or watching it from a far distance, feeling things only through a membrane, a glass sheet. i balance between the two. i feel the moment most viscerally, in the red and slick of the body, in the bonewhite and long muscle of the body. but i also sometimes float in a white nothing, watching the body as if from afar, thinking slow floating thoughts. there is the moment, and then the words of it, the small rocks guarding the edges of what happened. i want to gather these rocks.
i worry that i become quiet in academia. i know what to do with sentences so they sound an easy ripple. (i want to learn how to make the sentences sound like a thunder rush and wild cavernous bellow sometimes too). i feel like i hide myself in a cupboard before i venture out to write an essay. i call back for advice often, but from the dark and narrow space. i want to write loudly, full of my self(s). i want to write my essays loudly, i want to write my poems inhabiting them with all my slim body, my angles of light and sound, my fierce feelingness.
to do this, i must be less afraid of the words, of the rules, of Knowledge and its gatekeepers. i know some, and i will never know most. i must trust my work (n.w.). i must write hard and big and then hold on to my wordrocks, must fight for them. i must watch the world; i must defend the windows' right to look at passersby (mahmoud darwish). i must believe that i can do something with words, that i am not trite irrelevant callous bland unimportant. i know some things about words. how, when they are put together, can change things, can make a thing taste or smell or feel different. how they are read on the page but swiftly they make their way into the body, how they are read in the flesh layers under skin, on the light edges of skin. words talk straight to the body. the body lives in a large aquarium of language, its colourful weeds swaying like stalks in the field. the body breathes and floats in language. the white nothing the mind visits is a white nothing made of words. i want to make these words do things for me. i want to do things to people armed just with my wordrocks: i do not mean thwacking them over the head with them, but rather laying them down and covering them with the wordrocks, gently, smooth edges and all. running a stream through the wordrocks, making somebody experience the ripples and white foam of my words on their body.
i hope i can find in me the courage. to try hard enough that failing would slice right through my skin, would be a far and wide pain. to give this work enough of myself that i feel myself writing from my throat, my spine, my skin. i hope i am true enough to this that i do not scroll scroll scroll or find myself lost, small, flitting. i must stay with the thoughts. i must put all of myself here.